The IPocalypse has come. But don’t panic… yet.

In early February each of the 5 regional registries received one of the last 5 /8 blocks. The long predicted IPocalypse had arrived, IANA had run out of IPs. Of course the regional registries haven’t run out yet, but they have nothing to replenish their supplies with and will consume the remaining IPs at varying rates. AfriNIC’s /8 will last it years whereas APNIC’s 3 /8s it received in the past 2 months will last mere months. The only IPs available from IANA now are IPv6 addresses. You can whine and complain but that’s the way it’s going to be, we may as well prepare. I’ve been playing with IPv6 on and off since 2006 but I’m not going to give a tutorial on it. Rather I’m going to turn this into a linkfest of all the best resources I’ve found for basic IPv6 understanding. Some of the best sites act more as portals to information or large collections of documents rather than quick introductory pages.

Comcast has excellent materials at comcast6.net. It’s some of the best I’ve found, I’ll try not to duplicate information found there.

6Deploy has excellent slides in PDF form that quickly give a mid to high level overview of IPv6 and many aspects of it.

ARIN created a wiki for IPv6 information similar to the Comcast page. ARIN has a long history of running IPv6.

6DISS is an organization/project whose goal is to disseminate IPv6 education and information with an excellent collection of slides

DNS becomes very important with the long and complicated IPv6 addresses. Betrand Buclin of ISI wrote a nice introduction to DNS6.

If you prefer the accent of SANS ISC moderator Johannes Ullrich he has a set of Youtube videos as well. I haven’t viewed much of this series, I can’t comment on it’s content. It’s content is largely from the SANS course on IPv6 and this series probably upholds the SANS reputation for quality.

These are good starts and with the IPv6 familiarity gained one can go further with the help of google and several great communities such as gogo6, SixXs and Hurricane Electric which also offer IPv6 tunnels if you don’t have native access to IPng internet.